The present invention relates to multi-user networks and, in particular, to methods and systems for simplifying domain-name resolution services in a multi-user computing environment like a multi-tenant cloud-computing platform.
A data center configured to provide cloud-computing services to multiple “tenant” clients may isolate each tenant from other tenants by assigning to each client exactly one distinct domain name, such as www.Tenant1.com, www.Tenant2.com, or www.Tenant3.com. On a TCP/IP network, a pair of such domains is said to “overlap” if they both resolve to the same IP address. This may occur in a multi-tenant cloud that is configured to provide a distinct virtual domain or private network to each tenant.
In such situations, a computing platform may differentiate overlapping domains by assigning internal addresses to a URL within a tenant's private domain, and by using a private domain name system (DNS) server to resolve each tenant's internal addresses. For example, if Tenant1 and Tenant2 are tenants of the same cloud, third-party references to URLs within the www.Tenant1.com and www.Tenant2.com domains may initially resolve, through publicly accessible Internet DNS servers, to the same cloud-provider IP address. But when internal DNS requests originating from a tenant attempt to access an internal resource of the multi-tenant cloud, they might instead be redirected by a cloud-management platform to one or more internal or private tenant-specific DNS servers. These internal DNS servers would then resolve each reference to a private network address or other unique identifier that is specific to one tenant. In such implementations, dedicating a DNS server to each tenant can become inefficient and cumbersome in environments populated by large numbers of tenants. There is thus a need for a more efficient way to perform internal domain-name resolution to private domains within multi-tenant platforms that comprise many overlapping domains. More specifically, there is a need for a way to fully implement DNS functionality on a multi-tenant network without requiring a dedicated DNS server for each tenant.